Why does Mentor Graphics SUCK so very, very much?

(C’mon, you knew I was gonna say ‘Well let me count the ways‘, didn’t you?
All  the outrage that follows is couched in light of the limitations of the WordPress interface.
Wordpress is free, so they aren’t disrespecting their customers every moment of every day and
charging them thousands of dollars for it).

So, I’ve been fighting with Mentor Graphics’ DX Designer for the last week or so.  I’d been using Altium Designer previously (and giving them Hell about minor issues, honestly), but the company decided to standardize on Mentor Graphics for PCB design.

I have to say, compared to Altium, using the Mentor Graphics “PADSFlow” (or ‘PADSFlaw‘ as I like to call their abysmal constellation of half-assed software) is like trying to teach a pig to whistle.  The Mentor Graphics product really SUCKS and they know it well (because that is self-evident & I’ve told them so in detail).  I want to share my opinions about it with you (whoever “you” are).  Jesus H. Christ, I get a better user experience with CadSoft EAGLE, the pencil and quadrille paper I was designing with 30 years ago, or even the 80’s version of  “HiWire”  (the very first CAD I ever used).  I could deal with a Windows 3.1 level of user interface, even a DOS 5.0 user interface,  but with DX Designer I feel like my productivity would be better if I was actually PISSING my designs into a snowbank.

The DX Designer user interface is either un-evolved or just plain insulting for starters. Half of the time when I click on the “Help” button it will crash the application, and the times that it doesn’t  the information you need is just not there.  Don’t EVEN bother with the vestigial context-sensitive help icon, it will just open a browser window that tells you to look somewhere else for information.  (This “feature” alone puts Mentor Graphics at the top of my list of nominees for “Death by Mass Rabid Weasel Attack”).  It’s reminiscent of the scene in “Office Space” where they guys are trying to figure out how to launder money by looking up the definition in the dictionary; they found words but not answers.

If you are trying to manipulate a component on a sheet of your schematic but need to rotate it, you’ll need to open a pop-up menu for that component by clicking on one of the pixel-width lines within the component to open the window.  This will likely take you several tries (and that’s after you manage to zoom in on the component, more on that later).  If you are lucky enough to get that darned menu open, then you get to select the “Transform” option, then the “Rotate CCW” option, which will rotate it 90 degrees.  Boy, that sure makes more sense than having a hot-key and a smart selection routine that will grab the component when you click inside its boundary and then rotate it 90 degrees, doesn’t it?  (Please say ‘no’, so the righteous chain-whipping can begin in earnest).

Oh, you’d actually like to connect some components with lines (AKA ‘nets’)?  Here’s another really kludgey part of DX Designer: component pins had better be three grid increments apart or you are going to see your nets do some pretty weird snake-dances on the way (and then they will probably still evaporate like Karl Rove’s wet-dream of a permanent Republican majority after your terminating mouse-click).  Every pin seems to have this mysterious 3-grid “line of death or disfigurement” around it.  Kiss-off your hopes of making a fairly compact-yet-clear schematic in DX Designer or get ready to do the Snake Dance!  (This alone merits the “The Angry Mobs Decapitated Me” dis-merit badge for whoever made this the Mentor Graphics cannon).

Of course, to make a connection you have to be able to see a pin or endpoint clearly, and if, like me, you are working on some middlin’ complex stuff you’ll be needing to zoom in and zoom out at specific points of interest.  Well, DX Designer makes this a “Thing of the Future” by defining “zoom” to mean “zoom to center of sheet”.  Positioning your mouse and using the scroll button gets you a well tempered finger (from Mentor Graphics) rather than a clear view of the circuit element you want to see!  You are going to have to zoom in a little, then fiddle with the scroll bars at the right & bottom of the window, DC al coda.

Say you are working on a banked memory subsystem, with, say 16 each address and data lines (global signals) going to say 8 identical memory devices.  Can you do it one time, then paste copies of all the nets and labels on each memory device?  Not well or easily, unless you copy them off a different page because the idiot DxD product deletes the “global” attribute when you do this within the same page.  Lets count it up: 8 devices times 32 connection, times 4 mouse-clicks to access the local/global ticky-box = carpal tunnel syndrome, high blood-pressure, eye-strain and justifiable homicide.

As Ed Hurlihy would put it: “Time is on the competition’s side when you use DX Designer by Mentor Graphics!”.

Don’t even get me started about the friggin’ “pin files”, the bizarre “HETERO” settings or having to open symbols in MS Word to manually correct bogus default settings and such, the whole “get used to clicking on every signal on your schematic at least 10 times” or the “well, the ‘save + check’ function just barfed a lot of errors, but the error messages in the little  window aren’t linked in any way to the general region of the ‘note’, ‘warning’ or ‘error’ (so if DX is whining about something related to an oftentimes irrational default / invisible attribute conflict you don’t have a prayer of making use of the worthless Mentor Graphics product to find it).

Mentor Graphics is just a waste of time, spontaneously trashing designs.

Hint:  if DX Designer decides to screw up what you are doing…. just delete all the connections, labels and properties you can, then start over again (and again and again…) — it will take less time than finding the source of the problem {eg, your initial purchase decision} and correcting it.

DX Designer is the least capable and most infuriating schematic capture system I’ve used since 1982, bar none.  If you see it coming at you, SHOOT TO KILL or it will steal all your ‘essence’, defile your women, stampede your cattle and give you the Clap.  Yes, DX Designer is that unclean.

At several thousand bucks per seat and in light of the ‘issues’ built into the product (and I can only conclude it was with malice aforethought), if you don’t end up wanting to sue these bastards for gross negligence and misrepresentation, you deserve every bit of malfunction you’ve paid for (Duwane, I hope you are reading this!).

Mentor Graphics should be debarred from selling inside the USA just on the basis of the lack of a usable help system (it sucks so bad only to encourage you to buy their “training seminars” is my guess), the finicky non-response to selecting a net, bus or component, the poorly documented features (like refusing to recognize lower case pin numbers), the really cool way their software crashes leaving your design in ruins and their contemptuous license system (you want to be able to actually look at your CAM output… well, that’s an additional charge, you understand!  Sure, Pads can place/orient parts on a radial grid… but only one at a time, unless you give us even more money… and the blood of virgins, MWUAHAHAHAHAHA!).

Mentor Graphics as a whole, and DX Designer in specific, is either an EPIC FAIL or an EPIC ABUSE (or a continuing criminal enterprise), I can’t decide which.   It is hard to imagine this level of incompetent applications programming (after all these years), the product’s user unfriendliness and unwieldiness and the level of corporate “up yours, Bud” attitude that this product radiates as being anything except an embodiment of everything that’s going wrong in America right now.  Bring in the guillotines!

Does Mentor hire anyone that’s NOT a psychopath bent on destruction? Companies that put out this kind of excrement need to be shut down and their executives and managers blacklisted.  This gang has turned a once pretty okay product into crap, and nobody should pay them to do that again: they should be sentenced to screwing up orders in a fast food restaurant where the angry customers can call them personally to task for their sins, forever and ever amen!

If Mentor Graphics was located in my city, their executives and managers might suffer a much higher than normal rate of unfortunate “accidents” involving falling masonry, flammable substances or large object forcibly inserted into their rectums (as a warning to all who dare follow the ‘Mentor Graphics path to the Dark Side’).  These kind of sub-humans need to have their birth certificates savagely revoked: they steal from all Humanity, even while knowing better.  At this moment Mentor Graphics pisses me off even more than what’s left of the GOP KoolAid mixer/drinkers, the Birthers, the Birchers, the Klan and all those other of wastes of protein:  fuck’em all unto death, I say!

Don’t waste your money or time using Mentor Graphics products, gang!  Save yourself a lot of aggravation by sticking to almost any other product on the market:  it will be just as capable (if not more so) and lots less buggy… or wait for the wintertime, drink a lot of coffee and get your aim honed for action.   You’ll be glad you did.

Some free advertising copy for Mentor Graphics and their DX Designer ( I hearby formally and legally renounce to all parties and for all time the use of the following text by anyone including Mentor Graphics (may their nipples crumble into crusty bits in very public places and to their great displeasure, just because they deserve it for vending such UTTER CRAP as USABLE PRODUCT,  PraiseBob!):

• Mentor Graphics: more SUCK for the buck!
• I just love not being able to zoom to a selected location by default, that’s why I use DxD!
• DxD: Couldn’t we have beaten the ‘outsourced’ people harder to get a useful product?
  
• DxD: where even clicking on ‘Help’ can crash your system
• Dude, it’s totally ‘rad’ and ‘totally random’:  DxDesigner!
• You’ve got time to guess for a living: DxDesigner!
• Tear up your work and do it over again because you use Dx Designer!
  
• DxDesigner, from Mentor Graphics… because the other packages enhance productivity!
• You don’t hate life enough?  Try DxDesigner by Mentor Graphics, it’s ‘Craptastic^©‘!
• Death by a thousand mouse-clicks: Dx Designer?
• When I deleted this component all the buses and signals disappeared, too!  Dx Designer will blow you away!